C.L. Werner, the creator of two successful Warhammer series, was kind enough to drop by SwordAndSorcery.org for a talk about his fiction, sword and sorcery, and writing in general.

How did you get involved in writing Warhammer novels? Are you a war gamer or role-player or nothing of the kind?

I became involved with The Black Library (the publishing arm of Games Workshop--the power behind Warhammer) in 2001 with the publication of "A Choice of Hatreds" in issue #22 of the late and lamented Inferno! magazine, but I had been an enthusiast of their games for many years before that. I pretty much grew up with role-playing games, from the first edition incarnation of AD&D through ICE's Middle-Earth Role-Playing and Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu. I think all those sessions as a game master back then really helped hone my story-telling skills, especially in crafting vivid characters for the players to interact with pretty much "on the fly." Somewhere along the line I was introduced to the Warhammer setting by my good friend Matt, and found it to be a world that really catered to my tastes -- dark, nasty, and gritty. The rich background and mixture of influences that combine to make up the Old World of Warhammer is quite unique and creates a setting that I think is rather special in the genre of fantasy -- it might be thought of as what would happen if your typical high fantasy elements were forced into a world governed by the darker rules of traditional sword and sorcery.

I discovered Inferno! when it first launched, chancing upon its premier issue in a hobby shop one dreary afternoon. Of course I was ecstatic to find new fiction set in the Warhammer worlds; the prior novel line had petered out in the late 1980s and never really had much of a stateside distribution in any event, making the books very hard to find in pre-E-bay days. Sadly, and this should be a warning to all defeatists and procrastinators out there, it wasn't until three or four years later that I finally put a parcel of material in the post for the editors of Inferno! to consider. I often kick myself over all that wasted time. The writing samples I sent impressed Christian Dunn shortly before his rise to chief editor of the magazine, and he asked me to write a trial story. That story was good enough that it appeared a few issues later as "A Choice of Hatreds." I've been writing for The Black Library ever since.

Why don't you tell us a little about your two Warhammer series. Are they novels, or short story collections?

Well, soon it will be three series, but I don't know if I can divulge any more on that front at this time. The current ones are quite different in flavor and style from one another and, at least I hope, from any of the other novels in the Warhammer line.

My first series deals with Brunner, a ruthless, calculating bounty killer who prowls the length and breadth of the Old World tracking down his prey. Brunner is a very entertaining character to write, and I have a lot of fun putting him into situations where he has the chance to do the obvious "good guy" thing, and instead does something a good deal more unexpected and more mercenary. I often find it better to think of Brunner as a protagonist rather than a hero. The reader might root for him, but at the end of the day he's still a pretty nasty piece of work. The Brunner books are a fairly varied. The first one, Blood Money, is a collection of short stories, as is the second, Blood & Steel. With the third book, however, I had a story too big to share any of the room between the covers, hence Blood of the Dragon is a novel in its own right. Brunner also features in a short story in the anthology collection Way of the Dead and there is a further as yet uncollected Brunner story in the latest -- and last -- issue of Inferno! One thing I have tried to do with the Brunner stories, be they novels or smaller pieces, is to make them largely self-contained. There are references to other stories within them, but usually of an inconsequential nature that doesn't affect the readability of the story itself. I am not too ashamed to admit that my model for the encapsulated structure of Brunner's adventures has been Robert E Howard's original Conan stories.

The other series concerns Mathias Thulmann, a witch hunter in the largest Old World nation, called simply "the Empire" and modeled rather loosely on the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages. Now, in the Warhammer setting, witches and daemons are all-too real so witch hunters aren't quite the fanatic loons our own history often produced - they face real supernatural horrors with frightening regularity. That is not to say that there aren't some men who let the power they wield go to their heads, or develop a very extreme view of how to pursue their duties. Mathias Thulmann is a complex character; probably the best way I might describe him is as something of a hybrid of Matthew Hopkins and Solomon Kane. He's a very devout and pious man, with a genuine devotion to his faith and the welfare of the common people of the Empire, but at the same time he understands that fear is often the quickest way to get results, that violence and cruelty are sometimes the only way to combat the powers of darkness. He is accompanied in his travels by mercenary and professional torturer Streng, a brutal thug who contrasts rather dramatically with Thulmann's refined and philosophical approach.

The Brunner novels are adventure stories, though with a very gritty flavour to them. One reviewer described them as "Warhammer noir," which I think is a fair description. As much as any literary influences, Brunner certainly owes any success he enjoys to film noir and the classic spaghetti westerns. The Thulmann novels, by contrast, are much more in the vein of gothic horror. With them I really strove to capture the feel of the old Hammer horror films, the atmosphere of gloom and dread that makes those films stand up even today. The monsters in the Thulmann stories are just a bit more ghastly and unsettling in the way they are presented and the way the heroes struggle against them.

Do you plan to write more about Brunner, or have you switched completely to penning tales of Mathias Thulman? Do you have further plans for both characters? In an ideal world, how many books about each character would you give us?

Oh, I most certainly hope to continue writing stories with both of them. Brunner is a character who lends himself to such a wide array of possibilities that I think he's pretty much a bottomless pit of story ideas. In fact, I am hopeful that my next project will be another Brunner novel. At some point, however, I will be dealing with a running theme in the current Brunner books. I've dropped a great deal of hints and clues to Brunner's history, but at some point that history will need to be dealt with in a much less subtle manner.

With Mathias Thulmann I have a four-book story arc in mind which will follow his hunt for an unholy tome titled Das Buch die Unholden to its conclusion. Whether or not there would be any further Thulmann stories after that, I'm not entirely sure. It probably depends on whether the bad guys win at the end of the day!

What other fiction have you written?

I have had a handful of Lovecraftian pastiches published in magazines like Midnight Shambler and Cthulhu Codex, and have contributed a sword and sorcery tale to the Pulp & Dagger web-zine. Not a very impressive portfolio, but I do have a nice pile of rejection slips from print magazines dating back 15 years.

What do you do when you're not writing?

Usually I can be found either gnawing away on a book of some sort, or else parked in front of the TV rotting my eyes out with all-night Godzilla or Christopher Lee marathons. I manage a movie theatre as a day job, so that devours a fair amount of time too and am also one of the co-founders of kaijuphile.com, one of the largest Godzilla web sites on the net.

What writers did you grow up reading, and who were the biggest influences upon your own style?

A pretty mixed bag of authors, actually. I grew up on a diet of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe. It wasn't until high school that I encountered a certain H P Lovecraft for the first time, and his works had the effect of a lightning bolt on me. I think I can honestly say that it was Lovecraft who really made me determine to become an author. Once I encountered him, I started hunting down his contemporaries, thereby discovering Robert E Howard and the sword and sorcery genre, which was much like lightning striking twice. From there, it was a short journey to discovering Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock's Elric, David Drake's early work and the decidedly creepy stories of Henry S. Whitehead. There really isn't enough space to quite list all the authors whose works I've been inspired by over the years!

If I had to list the authors who have had the greatest influence on my own style, I think it would make for a very mixed bag. Lovecraft and Howard of course, as well as Clark Ashton Smith, whose obscurity today is a colossal injustice. I am a voracious reader of Walter Gibson's "Shadow" stories and continue to be amazed by how much action and plot he could sneak into a mere forty or fifty thousand words. Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels are another major influence, and I have mentioned Doyle earlier, both for Sherlock Holmes, of course, but just as importantly Professor Challenger. Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler are two authors who I don't think get enough respect these days, often being dismissed as simply the "creators of the hard-boiled detective novel," but they had a real craft for fleshing out very vivid characters with an amazing economy of words.

How can you tell when a writer is doing sword and sorcery "the right way?"

I think there are a number of things that a writer has to do to "get it right." First and foremost is how he approaches monsters and magic. If the monster is introduced and slaughtered on the same page, the author probably isn't doing it right. Monsters should be frightening--both for the character and for the reader and the hero should never overcome one without some serious effort. I think the way Howard handled monsters was extremely balanced--just look at the man-ape Thak in "Rouges in the House." It is handled with such an atmospheric build-up that we really get a sense of the unnatural and the horrific with Thak, and we really worry about how Conan is going to be able to overcome this ghastly creature. A lesser writer would simply toss Thak at his heroes and have it slaughtered a paragraph later-- never giving the reader a moment to consider the awe and shock such a creature's very existence would invoke in an observer.

Magic is very much the same. There is a disease that is rampant in fantasy fiction where magic has become almost mundane. Wizards are hired to heat furnaces, or to run "flying carpet transit lines" and other such nonsense. Somewhere along the line, magic has become common and many writers treat it as casually as a crime author might treat a handgun or a sci-fi author would treat a laser gun. Magic has become something that the fantasy author feels the reader will instantly accept so he doesn't need to explain it, or really devote any time to describing it. This might work for a hyper-drive or artificial gravity in a sci-fi setting, but I think it is really diminutive when applied to magic. Sorcery should always be shrouded in mystery; it should always have a slightly sinister air about it. Even the most innocuous spells should make the skin crawl, should have a feeling of "wrongness" about them. I am reminded of Arthur Machen's excellent stories and the very esoteric way he tried to describe true evil as a violation of reality-- trying to force rocks to sing and the sky to bleed, that sort of thing. I think that same attitude could easily encompass magic--it is something that twists and warps reality and even at its most benevolent, magic should still be viewed as something of an abomination.

While on that subject, wizards themselves should be treated much like magic itself--always mysterious and with a sinister air about them. Men who pursue such studies are learning things that the human mind is probably better off not knowing. They should always be treated as eccentric at best, certainly not quite as "grounded" as normal people. Much like other supernatural forces, a wizard should always feel a bit "wrong;" even at his most benevolent he's the sort of person who causes conversations to die and windows to slam shut.

I think it is these trappings of sinister mystery that really make a sorcerer stand out for the reader, much more-so than any world-shattering spells they might be called upon to cast every other chapter. Think about literary wizards like Gandalf or even Toth-Amon. They don't really do anything immense with their spellcraft, yet they have been given such a vivid air of unspoken power in their descriptions and the way people react to them that they stand out as some of the greatest sorcerers in the genre.

I've asked John Hocking and Bill King why they think sword and sorcery has almost disappeared--why do you think it's been so hard to find in the last years? Is the genre dead?

I think part of the problem was that sword and sorcery fiction was becoming much too standardized. A lot of the material being crafted in the late 1970s and through the 1980s was really becoming formulaic and unimaginative. I think that this resulted in a drift of readers away from fantasy and toward other genres, specifically sci-fi. With the rise of the sci-fi film through series such as Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and Star Wars, I think the fortunes of sci-fi novels, and particularly space opera, experienced an upswing. Fantasy novels began to follow the format of sci-fi novels, losing much of their esoteric trappings in the process. Indeed, I recall an Andrew Offutt novel that had dragons and such-like yet was set on an alien planet, with a hero who was dispatched there by some interstellar government. The reason that one stands out so vividly was that it felt to me like a standard sword and sorcery tale that later was altered to be marketed as a sci-fi one.

I think however that the fortunes of sword and sorcery are far from spent. The generations who have grown up on a steady diet of high fantasy novels are starting to demand something a good deal more engaging-- something with a harder edge and a sharper bite. There is the success of the Warhammer novel line to use as an example of this shift in tastes. Ace is releasing their Age of Conan line of novels this summer--three separate trilogies set in the Hyborian Age. A few years ago it seemed that TOR was testing out the market when they released Harry Turtledove's Conan of Venarium, so perhaps there will be more activity on that front as well. Ironically, the biggest stumbling block to a renaissance of sword and sorcery fiction lies in the fact that there is already so much excellent material out there for readers to sate their appetite on. I think this is why we have seen more reprints of sword and sorcery books than we have new manuscripts. Just recently Fritz Leiber's Fafhd and the Grey Mouser novels have been reprinted by White Wolf. TOR has been revisiting Robert Jordan's Conan pastiches. And of course Robert E Howard's stories have been manifesting themselves in slick hard-bound editions. I've even seen Elric popping up on store shelves again.

So I don't think sword and sorcery is done and gone. On the contrary, it might very well be on the rise again!